Twisted (22 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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It was the first harvest of the evening, but it would not be the last.
 
 
“Jesus Christ, look!”
Maura was pointing at the floor near the sealed pantry door, and all eyes turned toward the door. Grove saw it next. In the dim light of the lantern, a thin, gray tongue of dirty water shimmered and seeped under the door. All three of them stood up. The noise of the storm was so intense by that point, it was making Grove's ears pop and ring. It sounded as though a herd of elephants were stampeding across their roof.
“Shit!” Grove said.
“This is precisely what I expected,” Kaminsky commented dryly, glowering down at the moisture.
Maura looked nauseated. “The whole place is flooded, goddamnit, which means—”
“The levees have already gone south,” Grove interrupted. “C'mon, help me get some towels over there.”
They had collected a bundle of towels from the linen closet for this very purpose, and Grove and Maura hurried them over to the door, stuffing them against the gap at the bottom, while Kaminsky puffed his stogie and watched. The muffled jet-engine noise of the storm had changed over the last few minutes, like a giant blender rising up through its highest speeds, indicating the advent of the eye. The fastest winds mauled the Garden District now with ferocious bloodlust, the intermittent spasms jolting through the bungalow's foundation. Every few seconds, another distant, sickly cracking noise would rise above the atonal symphony, or a sharp crash of broken glass would ring out across the neighborhood, signaling the demise of another vehicle or building. It sounded as though the grand refurbished New Orleans was falling apart like a house of cards.
“Oh my God, there's something I forgot to tell you about that.”
“What ... ?” Grove turned away from the door, and saw that Maura was pointing at his spiral notebook, which now sat open on the cadenza. The sketch of the bloody hand-drawn characters and ritual placement of organs left at the Ulmer's Folly scene was clearly visible in the lantern light.
“That symbol,” Maura said, turning her nose up at the drawing as though it had a smell.
Across the room, Kaminsky put the earphone back in his ear and listened to the faint crackling of the National Weather Service.
Grove came over and looked down at the notebook. “What about it?”
Maura looked into his eyes. “This is on his chest.”
Grove stared at her. “What?”
She explained how she had accidentally discovered the strange scars on Doerr's midsection, and how they had matched up perfectly with Grove's sketch. It was as though Grove had literally
traced
the wormy, ropy tissue snaking between Doerr's nipples.
While Maura spoke, Grove felt that tight, cold pinch in his gut that always happens when the windows open up on a case, when the sources of psychopathology begin to reveal themselves. The kid had not only
seen
the exorcism, but had also
seen
the symbol on the floor, and had become obsessed enough to make shrines and even carve the symbol into his chest. Doerr was a lunatic. Sure. But now Grove was realizing that Doerr was
more
than a crazy person. Grove's heart rate began to quicken. Like Ackerman in the previous case, Michael Doerr had taken on the same parasitic personality.
Icy dread trickled through Grove's midsection. “Doerr wasn't the one who carved that symbol on his chest,” he said in a low, grave tone.
Maura looked at him. “What are you talking about, Ulysses?”
Grove gently took the spiral notebook back from Maura. He closed it and dropped it on the cadenza. “According to the padre, that star within a star is like a nuclear reactor for spirits, a giant black hole.”
Maura was shaking her head. “Now you lost me.”
“The eye just hit the Mississippi,” Kaminsky announced, nervously chewing his cigar. “It will be right on top of us in a matter of minutes.”
Grove said to Maura, “It's back, kiddo.”
“What's back?”
“The thing in Ackerman.”
A stunned pause. “Gimme a break, Ulysses.”
Grove didn't say anything, just turned away from her, reached over, and felt the collar of his Armani sport coat, which hung on a nail by the corner of the shelving unit. “There's a point in every case,” he said as he quickly slipped out of his NSA T-shirt, “a point where evidence analysis evolves into something else, and I think we've reached that point.”
“What are you doing, Ulysses?”
“My job.” He slipped on a fresh oxford dress shirt. It was slightly wrinkled but blazing white. He buttoned the sleeves, then tucked it into his slacks, which also looked brand-new. He began buttoning his shirt. He needed to straighten himself out. This was
his
ritual. He was a professional, and he required neatness. “We've reached the takedown phase,” he murmured then, “and that's what I'm going to do—I'm going to take this individual down. Whatever it is. Evil spirit. Schizophrenic. Whatever.”
“Any minute now!” Kaminsky called out, his finger pressing against the earphone.
Maura was wringing her hands. “Ulysses, I know what you're planning to do ... and I'm gonna ask you one last time, wait till morning. At least wait until morning.”
Buttoning his shirt, Grove saw something for a moment in his mind's eye: a flash of those damned blackbirds madly flapping their wings, trying to penetrate a wall of wind. “The eye is the key,” he said then to Maura. “He wants me in the eye. But he's vulnerable there, too, because the eye is the prison he's made for himself.”
“Oh, that is such voodoo profiler bullshit!”
“Maura—”
“C'mon, Ulysses, listen to that storm! That storm is real! That's not some abstraction out of your diagnostic manual. You think it's going to help matters for you to go out there in that shit and get yourself killed? You think that's going to slay this dragon?”
Grove reached into his knapsack and pulled a worn shoulder harness out. He slipped it on. The muffled shrieking of the storm kicked up yet another notch. It now seemed to squeeze down on them like a gargantuan vise. Grove stepped into a pair of hiking boots that he had brought in from the back of the Jeep. Rubber-soled and treated, they were affectionately known as “duck boots” among the bureau guys. “I'm not going to get myself killed,” Grove said above the noise, tying the boot strings, ears popping. “I'm going to get
Doerr
killed.”
“So now you're judge, jury, and executioner?”
Grove didn't answer but instead adjusted the harness, buckling it, paying close attention to the way it hugged his ribs and looped over his shoulders. He adjusted his collar. Everything had to look impeccable, lean and streamlined. He pulled the Charter Arms .357 from the pack. He snapped open the cylinder and checked the six rounds already seated there. The storm wailed.
Grove clicked the cylinder shut.
Up until the Sun City case a year ago, Grove, a onetime shooting champion back in the military, had grown a tad rusty with the old handguns. Profilers had very little call to fire weapons in the field. But in recent months, in the wake of all the insomnia, therapy, medication, and just general paranoia, he had become a regular at the shooting range. His weekly target practice sessions had become another security blanket, just like the medication. By the spring of this year, he had gotten back his old reptilian calm, his facility with the speed-loader, and his eye. His sighting eye.
“Listen to me, Ulysses, listen. Doerr's probably halfway to East Texas by now!”
Grove slipped on his spare Armani jacket, shot the sleeves, and brushed off the shoulders. He could see his reflection in the broken glass of a picture frame. He looked ready. He looked like an African-American senator about to go out onto the floor for a crucial vote, or maybe a dapper assassin. The latter was probably more appropriate.
“Listen to the nice lady, Grove,” Kaminsky piped in. “What she is saying is correct.”
“He's waiting for me, and he—
it
—is not gonna flee until one of us is dead.” Grove's voice was flat and cruel in his own ears as he pulled on his street-length black overcoat. He had already gone some place else. Some place deep inside himself. He was no longer a member of any established agency or law enforcement bureau. He was a practitioner of an
older
system of justice now. “I'm the last piece of the puzzle.”
Grove found the speed-loaders and dropped them into the overcoat pockets.
“We'll get a goddamned exorcist to help us,” Maura panted, “a witch doctor, a voodoo priest,
whatever
—just don't do this.
”
She was clenching her fists. She looked beautiful to Grove right at that moment. Her gray-green eyes on fire, her translucent skin blushed with emotion. Would this be the last time he would drink in those features? Almost as an answer to Grove's silent question, the storm wailed overhead, louder than ever. It sounded like the sky peeling open.
The room quaked then, something slamming down on the bungalow's roof, a tree perhaps. Grove buttoned his overcoat up to the neck, turning up his collar. Then he tightened the Velcro on his sleeves, putting on his fingerless, leather Carnaby gloves. The shooting gloves were gifts from his late wife, Hannah, and they had taken on almost talismanic power over the years. “I'm the exorcist now,” he said with a terse nod, flexing his fingers. “I'm going to cleanse the situation once and for all.”
Another barrage of wind assaulted the bungalow, this one stronger yet, rattling the structure down to its core. The floor trembled. The inner eye-wall winds had reached their zenith, tearing and rasping through the district.
“I give up!” Maura shouted, backing into a corner and hugging herself nervously. “What are we supposed to do while you're out there getting yourself killed?”
“You two stay put,” Grove said, straining his voice to be heard above the noise, reaching into his knapsack for one last item: a pair of night-vision goggles. He quickly looped them around his neck. “If I'm not back before the other side of the eye arrives, seal yourself in and wait out the storm!”
“Grove, listen to me!” Kaminsky had dug into his own pile of gear, and now stood in front of Grove holding one end of a massive coil of salmon-colored nylon mountaineering rope. The noise and pressure of the storm had risen to unbearable levels, so intense now it felt like Grove's eardrums were going to explode in his head.
“What the hell is that?” Grove indicated the rope.
“Take it, and tie it off to your waist!”
“Are you crazy!” Dizziness swam through Grove's brain, toying with his balance. He fought it, biting down hard enough to crack his jaw.
“Pay attention, Grove, for once in your life!”
“I gotta be able to move out there!”
“This line is nearly a thousand feet long, which is almost a quarter mile!”
“I don't need it!”
“Goddamn you, Grove, you will do this if you want any chance of survival!”
“Why is this fucking rope so important?”
“Because the eye is not only the most dangerous place in the world, it is also the most unpredictable!”
“Warning noted!”
“Listen to you, listen to you! ‘Warning noted'! You are truly an arrogant piece of a job!”
“Goddamnit, Kay—!”
“I am trying to tell you that if the eye closes on you, you will be blind!”
“What do you mean?”
“Two-hundred-plus-mile-an-hour winds behind the rain is a complete gray-out!”
“How much time do I have?”
“It is impossible to predict, it could stall over land, sure, for ten or fifteen minutes—”
“That's all the time I need!”
“You are not listening! It could just as easily pass through in a matter of seconds!”
“I'll take that chance!”
“If you do not tie this rope to your belt right now I will shoot you in the head with my shotgun until you are dead!”
Maura screamed: “Tie the fucking rope to your belt, Ulysses!”
“Jesus Christ, okay!”
The beast outside roared its primal roar, as Grove snatched the end of the rope out of Kaminsky's hands, then threaded it inside his belt, securing it to a loop, then slinging the heavy coil over his shoulder. The inner eye wall was right on top of them, the towels on the floor near the door completely soaked through, the long gray tongue of water reaching across the floor, the tremors constant now, making it feel as though the foundation was about to cave in.
“Goddamnit, Ulysses! You want me to beg, I'll beg—please, please,
please
don't go out there!” Maura backed into the corner, her tiny hands balled into tight little white fists. She burned her gaze into him.

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